BOOK NEWS FROM THE POLITICAL WORLD

OBAMA FLYING HIGH – BUSH IN FREEFALL 

Sales of books by President elect Barack Obama have soared into the hundreds of thousands during the past two weeks. Publishers Marketplace reports that seven contracts for books about Obama have been signed since Election Day. The frenzy is almost as high as it has been for the tell-all exposes that appeared during the Bush administration. 

Conversely, speculation about a memoir by our almost ex-President is not very encouraging. Most publishers see it as a potential loser or at least nowhere near as strong as, for example, the Bill Clinton autobiography that got off to its start with a seven-figure advance. 

The reasons given for the negativity include Bush’s incredibly low performance ratings and anticipated poor foreign sales because of his flat popularity overseas.  Nonetheless, polls show that he still hangs on to support from a low of 20% to a high of 31% of the populace. At the lowest level, that alone could produce sales of more than 5 million books. Not bad for a loser! 

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IS THE FUTURE OF

THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW IN QUESTION? 

Every author would swap his/her soul for an appearance on the Oprah TV show. Now rumor are beginning to fly that it may shut down its cameras in the fall of 2011 when the famous lady’s current contract with Discovery expires. According to a report in MediaBistro.com, Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav announced last week that he anticipates the syndicated show will probably close shop at that time. 

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A QUICK ALERT FROM BOOK EXPO

FOR AUTHORS INTERESTED IN SIGNINGS 

Book Expo  America announced that information on autographing sessions at the fair will be distributed by e-mail on December 11 to all authors who signify their interest. Send your contact info to dholton@aginet.com. Include your name and e-mail address.  Deadline for submission for this year’s event is March, 2009.  

Expo will be held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan from May 28 through May 31. You should be aware that the strongest attendance at this huge event always occurs when New York City is the venue. 

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OBAMA ELECTION HURT AND HELPED

CHICAGO AREA BOOKSELLERS 

Always on the lookout for interesting news from the publishing industry, Publisher’s Weekly ran a great story on the impact of Obama’s election on bookstores in the Chicago region. 

The President-elect is an avid reader and a regular patron of 57^th Street Books, one of three stores run by the Seminary Coop, a Booksense retailer. Store officials report that on Election Day the store was a hot spot of excitement and discussion. 

The store has already run launch parties for Obama’s books and has now raised a large banner congratulating  their “First Customer” on his victory. The store is located about a half mile from the Obama Hyde Park home. 

Things were just as exciting, but not as profitable for stores in some other area locations. Sandmeyer’s Books located just a few blocks from Grant Park, site of the Obama victory celebration, might just as well have shut its doors once The Loop was closed to traffic in the afternoon.   

Regardless of sales results, all of Chicago and especially every bookseller took great pride in the fact that a neighbor and an author had been elevated to such heights.

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TWO VERY WORTHWHILE EVENTS ARE? SCHEDULED

THIS MONTH FOR MID-ATLANTIC AUTHORS?

Pack your suitcases and book your space at two excellent promotional opportunities for regional authors at very reasonable costs. On September 21 and 22, Cherry Hill in New Jersey will be the site of the annual bookseller conference of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA).?

The association invites authors and publishers to provide sales tools like bookmarks, flyers and more for inclusion in packets it will distribute to its member booksellers. In addition, a special offer for table space is available. Just $100 to display to hundreds of book retailers. Contact Sheila Ruth at sruth@imaginatorpress.com for more information.?

The Baltimore Book Festival promises exposure to more than 60,000 potential buyers at its event September 26-28. The Midatlantic Book Publishers Association is manning a booth for books by its members and other interested indie publishers and authors. The MBPA? will also distribute packets of marketing materials to visitors at the booth. Both members and non members are invited to submit materials at very reasonable rates.?

More information including registration forms is available? at www.mbpa.cloverpad.org/ under the subset of ?Marketing Programs.?? Get moving because submission deadline is just around the corner.

GAS PRICES AND THE SINKING DOLLAR COMBINE

TO REDUCE TRAVEL AND HURT TRAVEL BOOK SALES 

Members of the American Booksellers Association recently told “Book Selling This Week” (BTW), the group’s newsletter, that they are moving fewer travel books as a result of soaring gas prices and the dwindling value of the U.S. dollar. 

More and more Americans have chosen either to remain at home or limit their travel to local adventures. As an example right in my own home, we eliminated European travel and headed up to Banff, Canada for a summer vacation week.  

BTW reported another interesting happening in book retailing. The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression  and the MLRC Institute (a media law resource center) are co-sponsoring  a program to bring reporters to bookstores around the country to discuss how the Internet is changing the practice of journalism.  

The speakers will be asking and answering some very crucial questions. Are bloggers really journalists? Has the Internet improved journalism or just provided a forum for disinformation? Should the same legal protections that newspapers and broadcast media enjoy be extended to journalists on the Internet? 

These are sessions well worth attending. Watch for them when they are scheduled at bookstores in your area. 

BUDGET CUTBACKS CONTINUE TO DESTROY

NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS 

The budget steamroller keeps on rolling across newspapers, crushing sections like book reviews that produce little or no revenue. Tribune Company’s Los Angeles Times, at one time the home of one of the nation’s finest book review sections, has confirmed that it is reducing its five person staff to three and its book review section will soon have to compete with other features for space when it is shifted to the Calendar pages. The paper does insist it is still committed to book review coverage” without specifying what that means. 

On the East Coast, the news from Tribune newspapers is no better. Carole Goldberg, since 2002 the highly respected books editor of the Hartford Courant has been terminated. The section is being moved to the control of the features staff.  

As this column has reported several times before, the life expectancy of self-standing book review section is becoming shorter and shorter. It’s a sad day for our industry.   

BOOK PUBLISHERS TAKING ACTION TO REDUCE

THE LOSS OF 30 MILLION TREES PER YEAR 

While large numbers of books and articles on protecting our environment have been produced in recent years, book publishers have only recently begun to think of the impact of the loss of 30 million trees a year to meet their paper needs. The magazine industry uses 35 million trees to produce the paper it needs, and newspapers require 95 million. 

Amy Goetzman, a well recognized freelancer, has written a compelling article in the Minnesota Post. In addition to citing the figures above released by the Green Press Institute, Amy reports that on average each book leave a carbon footprint of 8.85 pounds and the book publishing industry “as a whole emits a net 12.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide each year.”  

Fortunately, the Initiative states that 160 publishers are revising their operations in an effort to limit their impact on the environment. But that represents only about  40% of the industry. Amy does make a very interesting point when she observes that magazines and newspapers are usually read by only one or two people before they are discarded, while books are normally read by many more and certainly are kept a great deal longer. Sadly that still doesn’t reduce  the numbers of trees that are lost every year. 

THE GROWTH OF CANADIAN ONLINE USERS OFFERS

AUTHORS AN EXPANDED MARKET TO PROMOTE THEIR BOOKS 

When planning the online promotion program for your new book, don’t overlook the huge potential of our neighbor to the North. eMarketer, an outstanding source of information on the digital world, estimates that over the next four years, online use by Canadians will increase by about 1.5 million a year, passing the 25 million mark in 2012 when  penetration will reach 73%.  

Universal McCann reports that today 7.8 million Canadians go online every day. Karin von Abrams, an eMarketer senior analyst states that broadband is already more prevalent in Canada than in many other countries, including the US.  

In an in depth report that she has produced on the Canadian Internet, von Abrams writes that about two-thirds of Canadian households now have broadband, and predicts that three-quarters will be connected by 2012. The report is available  through www.emarketer.com.  

And don’t forget that there is a network of active libraries across Canada. Even most of those located in Quebec, the French speaking province, include books written in English. The distributors I spoke of in today’s first post have Canadian affiliates. Contact them 
 

THE SAD AND THE GLAD NEWS

OF BOOK SALES 

THE SAD NEWS

There was a drop of 1.8% in sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of May. Sales year-to-date have fallen by 0.7%.  

When broken down by category, the results show how topsy-turvy sales can be. Adult Hardcover sales for the year thus far have fallen behind by almost 10%, but the May figures came in at a 4.4% increase. Conversely, year-to date sales for Adult Paperbacks fell by 7.3%, but jumped 12.7% in May. That pattern may be the result of early summer sales. Paperbacks are easier to carry to the beach and not as prone to costly damage. 

But then you have the Adult Mass Market which has been sluggish all year and dropped almost 10% in May despite the anticipation of the beaching season. Childrens/Young Adult Hardcover fell again in May, this time by 4.9%, with Childrens/YA paperback sales beating May 2007 by a tiny 0.4%, somewhat below the year-to-date sales rate. 

Posting a 19.7% falloff for the year, Audio Books had a small positive blip upwards in April, but then crashed by 38% in May.  

THE GLAD NEWS 

These declines may be magnified because of the happy statistics from year 2007. Those are the numbers that the figures in the post above were compared to. 

According to R.R. Bowker book production last year posted a smashing 39% increase, adding 411,422 new books to the marketplace. A chunk of that jump was attributable to on-demand, short run and unclassified titles. Production in those categories jumped to 135,000, compared to just 20,000 the prior year. 

While business, religion and juvenile titles did slip a bit, literature posted the top gains. Fiction alone grew by 17%.

The competition gets tougher and tougher.